"He dreams of the day when the spell of the bestseller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered." Enrique Vila-Matas

Friday, August 29, 2014

Silent Lies The Lake

Efraim's Book by Alfred Andersch

The Homecoming

All the
great voyagers return

Homeward as
on an arc of thought;

Home like a
ruby beacon burns

As they
crest wind, scale wave, soar air;

All the
great voyagers return,

Though we
who wait never have done

Fearing the
piteous accidents,

The coral
reef sharp as the bones

It has
betrayed, fate’s cormorant

Unleashed,
whose diving’s never done.

Even the
voyager of mind

May fail
beneath behemoth’s weight;

Oh, the
world’s bawdy carcass blinds

All but the
boldest, rots the sails

And swamps
the voyaging of the mind.

But all the
great voyagers return

Home like
the hunter, like the hare

To its
burrow; below, earth’s axle turns

To speed
their coming, the following fair

Winds bless
their voyage, blow their safe return.

Barbara Howes

“Silent lies the lake,”
remarks the narrator at one point in this troubling, digressive, often oddly humorous
1967 novel by German author, Alfred Andersch. “What have I come here for?I have no news story, no feature for the news
telephones. Then what am I doing here?” Set largely in post-war Berlin, during
the Cuban Missile Crisis, Efraim’s Book
tells the story of English newspaper reporter, Georg Efraim, a disaffected German
Jew who, having been sent into exile during the war, has finally returned to
the scarred, still-haunted city of his birth. Ostensibly sent to Berlin to find
out if morale there was high or low, he also returns there to search for
clues as to the whereabouts of a Jewish girl gone missing during the war, his
former Berlin neighbor and current London editor’s estranged and illegitimate
daughter, Esther Bloch.

The city Georg finds is drably,
un-poignantly familiar to him: the river, the rain, an old synagogue in ruins.
Even his return to No. 12 Bismarckstrasse, the house in which he was born and
had lived as a boy, is profoundly anti-climactic. Hoping, without malice (‘I
didn't come here to look for murders. I don’t hate anybody.’), to meet the
people who took possession of the house after the arrest and deportation of his
parents, he is disappointed when the woman of the house, the wife of a geologist
and professor named Heiss, declares frankly, as if she’d been expecting him all
along, “You’d like to visit the house. Do come in.” Of course the Heiss family
is not the family that displaced his own, having taken possession of the house
only years later—after a string of tenants and refugees—in 1948. Embarrassed,
indifferent somehow, Georg feels compelled to reassure her:

“Don't take it to heart,” I say in an attempt to smooth
things over. I almost manage to laugh. “It’s always been that way, in every
period of history, people losing their homes, their property being divided up
as spoils, other people moving in as victors, and so on.”

While surely Frau Heiss is
surprised by his reaction of his, the reader herself is not, as even by this
early stage in the novel she knows this hero well, at least well enough to
appreciate, if not expect, such anguished and cynical twists. Still, and for
all the narrator’s candor in these pages, this ‘man without qualities’ remains
elusive—difficult, if not finally impossible to know. While a naturalized
British subject, Georg Efraim feels neither English nor German nor Jewish even,
except to the extent that he is bound to the race by recent history, by the
murder of his parents at Auschwitz as
Jews. His is a world governed by chaos, a world ruled not by God or fate or
logic but by randomness alone. There is not a trace of history or faith in him,
nothing but the cold, blunt recognition of chance:

It’s pure chance twenty years ago Jewish families were
exterminated, and not other families
twenty years before that, or later, or now, for example… In half an hour Frau
Heiss and her daughters will be sitting down to lunch. They could just as well
be dragged out of their house and murdered…

Or so it seems. Not long
after this scene, and despite his friends’ insistence upon the very particularityof Hitler’s dream, its stringent, naked
rationality, Georg reflects, “It makes no difference where one lives, what one
does, who one is.” Of course—and this proves one of the virtues of this novel—it
is a cynicism without passion, too wooden, too hollow to believe. Sure enough
the motives for his return to Berlin are more complex, more muddied than even
he himself seems willing to believe. A newspaperman on assignment, yes, a friend
determined to discover the fate of his editor’s daughter, surely, yet his
return to Berlin is motivated first and foremost, so the reader learns in time,
by his vexing desire to write a book, which he does—a novel about his life, no
less! Were that not enough he is writing it (the very story the reader is
reading, what the narrator belittles as ‘a certain arrangement of signs’) in German, a language he hasn’t spoken,
let alone written, in years. And so the plot thickens.

Yet there is still another
layer to the complexity of this novel, one far from intentional. In the end,
what is perhaps most intriguing about this engaging, if imperfect tale, is author
Alfred Andersch’s often bumbling and transparent struggle to come to terms—long after the fact—with his own complicity as a German during Hitler’s reign. While
briefly interned in Dachau for his Communist sympathies, he—like his fellow
Group 47 members, Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass—spent the war years living
comfortably in Germany, if perhaps grudgingly, working and writing unmolested
in what, following the war, Andersch defined dubiously as a state of ‘internal emigration’:
“I could have emigrated,” he said, “but I did not. To go into internal
emigration under a dictatorship is the worst alternative of all.” It was an
assertion, a claim, that did not sit well with many of his compatriots, most
notably the writer W.G. Sebald who takes him to task in his illuminating essay “Between
the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” At the heart of Sebald’s criticism is what he
views as Andersch’s all-but-blind ambition as a writer during the war, a literary
avariciousness, a moral and artistic failure, that is only highlighted,
compounded, by his efforts in Efraim’s
Book. If indeed Andersch was opposed to the Nazis, particularly to their
treatment of the Jews, what, wonders Sebald, could have induced him to stay?

2 comments:

Glad to see this post; glad to see any appreciation--however measured and with reservations--of Andersch's beautifully written and intricately constructed novel, one that carries us, along with its narrator, seamlessly from one time and place to another. Such a pity that the author's dubious actions during the war have cast a shadow not only over his reputation as a whole, but over this exquisite minor masterpiece. Sebald's bones of contention notwithstanding, I feel that the book deserves to be dragged out of that biographical shadow and appreciated for its own merits. That artists behave badly doesn't prevent them from creating beautiful things. For sure with Efraim's Book Andersch made something beautiful. It is a haunting book, and beautifully translated into English by Ralph Manheim.

Glad to see this post; glad to see any appreciation--however measured and with reservations--of Andersch's beautifully written and intricately constructed novel, one that carries us, along with its narrator, seamlessly from one time and place to another. Such a pity that the author's dubious actions during the war have cast a shadow not only over his reputation as a whole, but over this exquisite minor masterpiece. Sebald's bones of contention notwithstanding, I feel that the book deserves to be dragged out of that biographical shadow and appreciated for its own merits. That artists behave badly doesn't prevent them from creating beautiful things. For sure with Efraim's Book Andersch made something beautiful. It is a haunting book, and beautifully translated into English by Ralph Manheim.

George Ovitt and Peter Adam Nash

George Ovitt is the author of The Restoration of Perfection; The Snow Man, a collection of short stories, and Splitting the Difference, a collection of poems.
Peter Nash is the author of a recently completed novel called Parsimony, as well as of a biography on the life and times of the turn-of-the-century Jewish American sculptor, Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel. He can be reached at nashpeter@mac.com.